


Love is not All

by bathsheba78 (78bathsheba)



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse, Complete, Consensual Violence, Dubious Consent, F/M, Implied Torture, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 00:13:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/545373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/78bathsheba/pseuds/bathsheba78
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You really have a taste for women who like to destroy you, don’t you?" Johanna sneers. "Mommy. Katniss. Me. "</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love is not All

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The Hunger Games do not belong to me.
> 
> This is not a nice story, but it's been rattling around my head for weeks and I needed to get it out.
> 
> 11/16/12 Edit: this isn't a true update, as this is a one-shot. I just made some minor adjustments, and fixed some bizarre formatting errors that had been driving me crazy.

No one is more surprised than Peeta when he shows up at Johanna's. 

"What the hell are you doing here?" she greets him in typical fashion from the half-closed door. 

"I had nowhere else to go," he shrugs. 

"She's out, you know," Johanna counters, her face carefully expressionless. "They dumped her back in District 12. Haymitch is babysitting her." 

"I know," Peeta says simply, stepping past her and through the doorway. "But my family is dead, my district burnt to ash, I'm insane, and now, apparently, she is too." He says this with only the slightest trace of bitterness, and his face is thoughtful and clear as he holds her gaze. "It really doesn't feel like home anymore." 

By "it," of course, they both know he means "she," but Johanna isn't about to point that out. "Bunch of empty rooms upstairs," she says gruffly, wrapping herself back up in the pile of blankets on the couch. "The last one on the right is mine." She flips on the TV, and Peeta nods. She stares into space and ignores his heavy tread on the stairs. 

\--- 

Peeta has an episode that first night, and now he's even more afraid to sleep than usual. So, he wanders the house like a ghost, the way he used to on a train, lifetimes ago. Johanna's drunk when he comes across her, swaddled in blankets on the living room floor. 

"Welcome to the lonely hearts club," she slurs. "Welcome to the land of unrequited love. Of always second best." 

\--- 

They avoid each other at first, and it's almost like they're not living in the same house at all. Johanna spent too much of the recent part of her life nocturnal, and old habits are hard to break. Peeta, on the other hand, has a brief lifetime of being a baker behind him, and can't help but be up at dawn and in bed shortly after dark. He goes through the motions: bakes, keeps house, paints the deep forest not far from Johanna's door, and does his best not to lose the parts of his mind he has fought so hard to reclaim. As for Johanna--well, he's not really sure what Johanna does . 

They both have terrible nightmares. 

\--- 

After a few weeks, their schedules start to align. Peeta is simply too exhausted from the chronic insomnia to be up at the crack of dawn anymore, especially when he discovers that he can usually wring a few hours of sleep out of the day in the early morning, when it's already light. Johanna can't sleep while Peeta's tromping around the house, so she simply adjusts the whole lot of nothing she does during the day to coincide with when he's up. 

They still don't talk much. They don't need to. They were both there-- right there, on the edge of the knife-- in the Capitol. Each knows what the other has seen, and heard, and felt, and done (or been forced to do) during those endless days. They don't need to talk. 

\--- 

It's Johanna, so when it happens, there are no hesitant touches or furtive glances. Neither of them were exactly blushing virgins before their extended stay in the Capitol's finest torture chambers, and whatever pretensions of shame they may have had were lost somewhere between the first broken bones and the final, humiliating pleas for mercy. They'd both been through too much to play that game. To pretend otherwise and feign innocence would only disrespect their shared history. 

\--- 

It's not healthy, what they have--not always--and it's not love; at least, not the way Johanna knew from her brief but happy childhood, and certainly not the way Peeta had dreamt of those fevered nights when he was young and didn’t know better. Usually, though, it's fine. They don't fight often, though when they do, it's spectacularly bad. They are both Victors, after all. 

Once, it happens when Johanna declares that tonight's safe word will be "mockingjay," knowing full well that Peeta will never say it. She brutalizes him that night, though really it's no worse than one of the lighter days of torture they experienced. A "healing" day, they called it. He responds by taking her so hard that for hours afterwards she's wracked by aftershocks from the orgasms. They send for a healer to stop their bleeding. 

Another time, at the breakfast table, Peeta quietly asks Johanna to wear her now-grown hair in a braid. She stares at him for a full minute before mutely rising, pulling out a large kitchen knife, and unceremoniously hacking off her ponytail before turning back to him . 

"You really have a taste for women who like to destroy you, don’t you?" Johanna sneers. "Mommy. Katniss. Me. " 

The knife clatters to the ground as Peeta picks her up and slams her against the wall. Johanna grins from where she lays crumpled on the floor, wiping flecks of blood and spittle from her chin before reaching for the discarded knife. By this point, the healers don't even bother to ask what happened. 

\--- 

"Say her name when you come," she whispers into his ear as she rides him, hard and fast, clutching his shoulders so hard that her ragged nails break the patchwork skin. 

"Katniss," he chants with closed eyes. " Katniss Katniss Katniss ." 

\--- 

Sometimes they huddle together for comfort. Sometimes they cling to each other to forget. Sometimes they rail at the world, decrying the loss of everything they might have been and might have had, broken by the knowledge that sometimes there is no lesson to be learned, no greater purpose for the suffering. Sometimes there is no happy ending. And sometimes, terribly, there is no ending at all. 

\--- 

"Do you still love her?" Johanna grunts as Peeta slams into her, over and over. 

"Always." he says, and together they fall off the edge of the world.


End file.
